The Asylum

The team minus Agha.

"I draw the line between hospitals and asylums," Erika said to me as I went through my list of Adventure Friends, inviting them to hop on board my latest venture. Her curiosity eventually got the better of her. But this was one adventure I knew not everyone would be willing to join me in. Even Millo had to think twice, and he had been on this journey before. But he, Agha, and Christina answered the call along with Erika, and soon we were five, making the trip down to deep Saitama on board local trains, chasing fear like a junkie chases a high.

Not all of my companions wanted to be here by the time we took this pic.

The building we stood before was once known as the Asakura Hospital. Today, it's a place known only to self-reputed ghost hunters. For 14 years has it stood in silence, disturbed only by those who dared breach its walls to uncover its secrets. In its heydays, the Asakura was a mental clinic, you see, and when it shut down, rumors of the reason for its abandonment spread throughout the urban explorers, and soon attracted the ghost hunters. Some sources say the place shut down because an unreasonable amount of deaths made authorities suspicious of medical malpractice occurring within its walls. The last time Millo visited, said he, the sounds of doors opening and closing echoed throughout the building, despite its seeming stillness.

 The way was basically paved for us already by other explorers. Through breeches in fences, we managed to enter the facility, and found it to be in in complete disarray. The first floor was a mess full of broken glass and torn up pages, with messages lining the walls. If there's one thing urban explorers like to do is play tricks on the next batch of explorers following them. It was all we could do to ignore the messages written in red along the walls, saying things in the vein of "there is nothing to do here but die." But I could feel the discomfort rising in some of my companions already.

 A branch in our path soon offered itself to us - downwards to the basement, or up to the upper floors and roof? We decided to plunge into the belly of the beast, and so down it was.
 The basement looked like a dungeon.

Not really sure what it's an x-ray of, though.

 Consisting of nothing but a hallway lined with prison-like cells, the basement was spooky in its eerie silence. Wheelchairs were scattered throughout the floor, inside and out of cells alike, though I suspect this is also the doing of past explorers. We made our descent in relative silence, passing row upon row of rusting bars. Would this be where they kept the unstable patients? Upon a table in one of the rooms at the end of the hall were scattered record books full of black sheets that were immediately familiar to me from my previous experiences with Haikyo. I lifted one to my light and confirmed that they were x-rays.

 On the higher floors, we found the patients' rooms and beds. Unlike other ruins I had been to in the past, most furnishings in the building had been removed, save only the hospital beds, which stood where they were, gathering dust. Several rooms full of them were all that was left of the upper levels, and silently, so as not to wake the neighborhood we could see through the windows, we made our way to the roof.
 The town was asleep. We decided to rest here and started joking amongst each other, and I found myself enjoying the cool breeze under the night sky. And that was when some of us heard it - the sound of footsteps coming up the very same steps. Panic took our group, but we responded fast - Agha was fast out of sight, and Millo took care of hiding himself and making sure Christina did the same. Erika and I opted to hide behind the stairwell, and I positioned myself so that I could see who the incoming party was before they could see me.

 But rather than the authorities, the group turned out to be a smaller posse of ghost hunters. I took care not to scare the shit out of them as I popped out of the shadows and introduced myself, but ended up doing so anyway. My companions soon came out of their respective hiding spots too, and we soon began conversing. "You know this place is famous for ghosts?" the guide in their group asked me. "Have you seen the blood covered bed?" No, in fact, we hadn't.
 They brought us down a floor and showed us the one bed covered in deep brown stains. It was soon after that that the other groups left in silence, without so much as a goodbye. I'm a skeptic by nature, I guess, but it was around this time that some of my companions decided they weren't keen on staying around too much longer. Come to think of it, the group didn't really talk about that bed much after that.